Players in the National Football League make a living in a workplace unlike any other. They tackle and block in practice — encounters that can boil over into fistfights — then shower together as if nothing happened.On game days, they perform their job duties with orthopedists, neurologists and ambulances ready to intervene. They evaluate their success or failure while standing half-naked in the glare of TV cameras.Inside the locker room, they play cards and needle colleagues with profane language banned at office water coolers. When they clock out, changing from gladiator gear to flip-flops under the nameplate on their cubicle, they exit an insular world where the rules of interaction are much different than those in civil society. Behavior boundaries are so elastic, in fact, that Miami Dolphins players don’t expect outsiders to understand why they are defending offensive lineman Richie Incognito ...

But the Dolphins and the NFL are being criticized for allowing a machismo culture to thrive to the point where bullying and hateful language were accepted under the guise of brotherhood building.

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Harry Edwards, a leader of the civil rights movement and consultant for the San Francisco 49ers since 1985, said the extremes of a hypercompetitive environment where “guys are dependent on each other to avoid winding up in a wheelchair” do not excuse the use of racist or homophobic epithets. “You’re looking at a group of young men who do not understand their own history or the path by which they arrived to enjoy the opportunities they possess,” Edwards said. “Dropping N-bombs on each other or granting license to some member of another group to say that word is not a generational thing. It’s an ignorance thing.”Edwards, professor emeritus at the University of California who has also worked with the Golden State Warriors and inside Major League Baseball clubhouses, said the NFL must find a way to resolve the Dolphins crisis in the wake of the concussion issue and New Orleans’ “Bountygate” if it wants to maintain its status as America’s favorite sport.“Black parents are saying, ‘If a white man has latitude to demean a black man in a throwback to Gone With the Wind, and Tony Dorsett is losing his mind, and the league has a team nickname [Redskins] so revolting even its home city has rejected it, maybe I don’t want my son playing football,’?” he said. “Athletes may be defending each other but what many perceive as a dysfunctional and borderline barbaric culture is not playing well with the general public.”

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Luther Campbell called Dolphins players’ defense of Incognito “a copout, an excuse and a spin job.”Campbell learned about the power of language when he was a rap star and the sexually explicit lyrics of his record As Nasty as They Wanna Be were at the center of a free-speech debate, which he won in a 1992 Supreme Court case. That was entertainment, a ribald parody, he said.But as coach of youth league and high school players, he does not tolerate cursing or use of the N-word.“There is nothing cool about using a word that disrespects your mother, your community, your friends and yourself,” said Campbell, founder of the Liberty City Optimist League. “The Dolphins weren’t performing a comedy club routine. In the context of calling a teammate on the phone and using that word — that’s hardcore. Honorary black guy? I don’t believe it. It sounds like a bunch of gutless black men, which was a culture shock for Martin, and which explains why that team is so sorry.”

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Incognito was dismissed from the Nebraska team at the start of his senior year and from the St. Louis Rams three-quarters of the way through the 2009 season. The Dolphins were not planning to re-sign him after 2013.